[crdrost]

Just take the downvotes with pride.

You have a valid point, which is that we are not even being rigorous enough about the meaning of the word “rigor” in this context.

- One poster praises how programming needs to be boiled down into executable instructions as “rigor,” presumably comparing to an imaginary math prof saying “eh that sort of problem can probably be solved with a Cholesky decomposition” without telling you how to do that or what it is or why it is even germane to the problem. This poster has not seen the sheer number of Java API devs who use the Spring framework every day and have no idea how it does what it does, the number of Git developers who do not understand what Git is or how it uses the filesystem as a simple NoSQL database, or the number of people running on Kubernetes who do not know what the control plane is, do not know what etcd is, no idea of what a custom resource definition is or when it would be useful... If we are comparing apples to apples, “rigor” meaning “this person is talking about a technique they have run across in their context and rather than abstractly indicating that it can be used to fix a problem without exact details of how it does that, they know the technique inside and out and are going to patiently sit down with you until you understand it too,” well, I think the point more often goes to the mathematician.

- Meanwhile you invoke correctness and I think you mean not just ontic correctness “this passed the test cases and happens to be correct on all the actual inputs it will be run on” but epistemic correctness “this argument gives us confidence that the code has a definite contract which it will correctly deliver on,” which you do see in programming and computer science, often in terms of “loop invariants” or “amortized big-O analysis” or the like... But yeah most programmers only interact with this correctness by partially specifying a contract in terms of some test cases which they validate.

That discussion, however, would require a much longer and more nuanced discussion that would be more appropriate for a blog article than for an HN comment thread. Even this comment pointing out that there are at least three meanings of rigor hiding in plain sight is too long.